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Patricia Pearson’s sister, Katharine, had metastatic breast cancer. At about 4:30 a.m. on March 18, 2008, Katharine was unable to sleep, when she suddenly felt hands on her head and a surge of joy. This extraordinary spiritual experience, as she later called it, lasted about two hours. In the morning, she told her son about it and recorded it in her diary.

Later that morning, Katharine and the rest of the family got phone calls: Their father, Geoffrey, had died unexpectedly in his sleep.

Patricia describes Katharine as not prone to spiritual experiences, but at their father’s memorial service, Katharine recounted what happened and told the mourners: “I now know that it was my father.”

Her sister’s encounter led Patricia, an award-winning journalist, to explore the world between dying and death in her new book, Opening Heaven’s Door: What the dying may be trying to tell us about where they’re going.

Many people might chalk up your sister’s experience to coincidence. Why did you pursue it?

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Because it didn’t feel like a coincidence. The experience was not something she had ever had any other time. What does it mean to sense a presence, to feel a surge of spiritual energy you never felt before? It’s a unique experience and that’s what got me interested in exploring it.

You talk about “nearing-death awareness.” What’s that?

Hospice staff see subtle shifts of consciousness. People start talking in symbolic language about their dying. They’ll say, “I need to go shopping now,” or “Get my shoes. I’m going home.” In my sister’s case, she made references to airplanes taking off. (Katharine died later in 2008.)

Another facet is the tendency to interact with an invisible presence. They see someone already deceased and chat with the person. When that happens, hospice nurses say the person is going to die soon. There are subtle elements that make it distinct from brain-based hallucinations.

How is it different?

It doesn’t have a random quality. Someone may hallucinate about an elf in the corner. But they don’t react to the elf per se. With nearing-death awareness, it alters their sense of things and they react. They’ll say something like, “I am going now. This person at the end of my bed is going to take me away.” And they will die in the next 24 or 48 hours.

How does medical science explain this awareness?

It doesn’t. Theories have been offered related to morphine, but careful research finds no correlation with medication. If anything, it’s correlated with less medication and less brain disease. People whose brains are clouded with tumours are less likely to have those clear visions.

We’ve heard about near-death experiences, about a white light. What else might happen?

In interviewing people with NDEs, I found it was much more complex. There’s a moral quality. The experience of light isn’t visual, it’s an experience of dissolving into light that is also love and wisdom. They merge into this consciousness. Another detail that sometimes happens is the exposure to self-reflection. You experience the harm you’ve done to other people from their perspective.

Was there an account of a near-death experience that particularly grabbed you? A good glimpse of heaven?

What they say comes through in the intensity of their emotions. What grabbed me the most was seeing somebody talk about what happened 20 years earlier and they’re still vibrating with the awe of the experience. The other thing that stuck out for me was the sense of unconditional love. It’s consistent in these experiences.

Any accounts of going the other way? Glimpses of hell?

Yeah, although near-death experiences with a hellish element are relatively rare, maybe people just don’t want to talk about them. One woman had an experience during childbirth. She saw black and white circles that kept clicking at her, taunting her, telling her she didn’t exist. She felt devastated. She struggled to understand what it meant.

Can brain science explain near-death experiences?

For a long time it was talked about in terms of oxygen deprivation. The problem with that is most people in emergency are monitored for oxygen. Another theory was that it happened to people who had REM intrusion when they slept. But the research showed that was only true for 40 out of 100 cases. Everything that gets offered up, gets batted back down by other scientists. It remains a mystery.

What’s your view on psychic phenomenon such as telepathy?

So much research has been done on telepathy and it’s shown consistent results over time. There are scientists who are completely confident that this phenomenon exists. Yet because it’s so taboo, it never breaks free of the lab in terms of people accepting it.

Did any examples sway you?

A couple of them amazed me. One mother jumped out of bed because she thought the window shattered. She tried to extract shards of glass from her bedding. There was nothing. The next day she learned her daughter had been in a car accident in which the windshield had shattered.

You asked your deceased sister to send a sign. What happened?

About a month after she died, I was in a state of despair and I asked her to find a way to tell me she was all right. A plant that had been flat-out dead for six months had a huge perfectly-formed pink bloom.

After all your research, how do you now explain your sister’s experience the night your father died?

I guess that she was picking up on his dying. The comfort and spiritual uplift, she was sharing his feelings as he was dying. That’s my guess.

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